A Two Thousand Dollar Nebraska Land Purchase Leads to a Federal Fraud Case
By four that afternoon, the wind had picked up from the north, whistling through the dry bluestem grass of my western pasture. I was out by the new fence line, setting the third corner post, when a dark vehicle stopped on the shoulder of the county road.
Chadwick Fairmont sat in the driver’s seat of his black Tesla, the window rolled down just two inches. He raised a pair of heavy black binoculars to his face, pointing them straight at my tractor and then at me.
I did not drop my post hole digger, and I did not walk toward the road. I stood there in the cold wind, my boots planted deep in the Nebraska soil, and stared back into his lenses until he finally lowered them and drove away.
At ten forty-five the next morning, I walked back into Sarah’s office and placed five hundred dollars in cash on her desk. The bills were old and crisp, the last of the small inheritance my grandfather had left me in an envelope marked for emergencies.
“This is the shield,” I said, pointing to the money.
